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Interested in setting up a NAS at home, What are my options?


Bambu Utila

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Bambu Utila

Hi,

I'm looking for some advise on setting up my own NAS at home. I'm only doing this to get some safety if one of my HD's would ever crash. I know, I know, a NAS and RAID, unRAID,... are no replacement for a backup Smile I'm mainly doing this for my movies/tv shows/music. All my really important files are backed up properly and to the cloud too. I can always get the movies/... back but it takes effort. I'm checking in these forums since i assume a lot of people here will be in the same boat as i am.

I'm not looking for somebody to guide me through the process of setting everything up, i can find tutorials, youtube videos,... to help me with the setup. What i'm after is the right software to use, files system and raid config ideas. So the what, not the how.

I'm open to hardware suggestions for upgrades in the future, but for now i don't have any money to change anything hardware wise (Corona times and no job).

My current setup is:

Intel NUC 7th Gen Core i3 with 16GB ram
SSD Bootdrive
SSD 2.5 Data Drive
Powered USB3 HUB
2x WD 2TB HD USB3
1x WD 4TB HD USB3

TV is my monitor

Nvidia Shield with Kodi on other TV

I use Win 10 with Emby as media server and Kodi as a front end on the NUC
The 3 External HD's contain my movies and are shared so all my connected devices play direct from them no transcoding going on in emby.
I also run Home Assistant in a Hyper-V VM, just to play around with.

So now come the point where i'm asking for help Smile

I can stick with Windows, it's what i know. My options here are to use something like Storage Spaces or DrivePool to pool my drives together and set some sort of raid1 or raid5 up. I also ran into something called SnapRaid which seems interesting if i understand correctly what it does.

OR

I could go the proper NAS OS route and go with FreeNAS, OMV, unRAID,...

Here I lack knowledge, but i do like tinkering with things and i have plenty of time to learn. 
OMV seems interesting, it allows me to install Emby, Home Assistant, PiHole, and a bunch of other stuff in Docker containers. Never worked with them, but i understand the concept.
I have some spare external HD's to play around with while setting things up, so i would not have to use my 3 in use HD's with media on them.

So does this community have any valuable input about what direction i should take?

What would give me the best experience, best data speeds, what's the safest option?


I hope this word salad makes some sense, thanks for reading and hopefully answering Wink

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Dibbes

Personally I'm using both Synology boxes (which is not an option, the way I read your post) and unRaid that I'm using with old hardware. unRaid is easy to setup, cheap to license and very versatile. You could, if you want your Emby server on the same box (I have a separate server) by installing this in a VM. unRaid allows you to pass through hardware, like CPU cores, I/O ports or a GPU directly to the VM.

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Bambu Utila
9 minutes ago, Dibbes said:

Personally I'm using both Synology boxes (which is not an option, the way I read your post) and unRaid that I'm using with old hardware. unRaid is easy to setup, cheap to license and very versatile. You could, if you want your Emby server on the same box (I have a separate server) by installing this in a VM. unRaid allows you to pass through hardware, like CPU cores, I/O ports or a GPU directly to the VM.

I'm trying not to spend any money, i would have to buy the Plus Key just to be able to expand my storage a little bit. Also i don't like the idea of having the OS run from a USB stick. I read that they aer quite picky and have to be replaced fairly often. Here in Honduras i don't have easy access to good quality USB sticks.

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Dibbes
Just now, Bambu Utila said:

I'm trying not to spend any money, i would have to buy the Plus Key just to be able to expand my storage a little bit. Also i don't like the idea of having the OS run from a USB stick. I read that they aer quite picky and have to be replaced fairly often. Here in Honduras i don't have easy access to good quality USB sticks.

I've been running the system for over 2 years now on the same 5 Euro pendrive (8GB USB 2)... maybe I've been lucky :)

Either way, if you don't want to spend any money at all, then I suppose you're going to have to go with FreeNAS, unless you already have a Windows Key... I haven't used FreeNAS for a long time, so there's not a lot I can tell you besides what you can easily find on the interwebs...

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aspdend
11 minutes ago, Bambu Utila said:

I'm trying not to spend any money, i would have to buy the Plus Key just to be able to expand my storage a little bit. Also i don't like the idea of having the OS run from a USB stick. I read that they aer quite picky and have to be replaced fairly often. Here in Honduras i don't have easy access to good quality USB sticks.

I've been running my unraid setup for 5 years or so on the same usb stick - never had a problem with it

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Bambu Utila
2 minutes ago, Dibbes said:

I've been running the system for over 2 years now on the same 5 Euro pendrive (8GB USB 2)... maybe I've been lucky :)

Either way, if you don't want to spend any money at all, then I suppose you're going to have to go with FreeNAS, unless you already have a Windows Key... I haven't used FreeNAS for a long time, so there's not a lot I can tell you besides what you can easily find on the interwebs...

I have 2 identical USB sticks here i can give it a go if it installs on one of them. They have a 30 day trial version i can play with.

A lot of what you can do with Unraid you can also do with OMV.

So if i would use Unraid, could i use one of the SSD's as a cash drive, the other as just a drive where downloads go and docker containers get installed, then use 1 external HD as a parity drive, then 3 more external drives to make the pool. That pool would then be shared and would contain my movies and other data. Would that be a rough idea to setup ?

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Bambu Utila

I have one more question before i give Unraid a go.

Right now i have those 2 SSD's with Win10 and data on them.

If i install Unraid from the USB, technically if i don't do anything with those SSD's in Unraid they stay untouched. So if i unplug the USB drive i should just boot back into windows, is that correct? Or am i missing something here?

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aspdend
11 minutes ago, Bambu Utila said:

I have 2 identical USB sticks here i can give it a go if it installs on one of them. They have a 30 day trial version i can play with.

A lot of what you can do with Unraid you can also do with OMV.

So if i would use Unraid, could i use one of the SSD's as a cash drive, the other as just a drive where downloads go and docker containers get installed, then use 1 external HD as a parity drive, then 3 more external drives to make the pool. That pool would then be shared and would contain my movies and other data. Would that be a rough idea to setup ?

Try to use USB 2 rather than USB 3 drives as they work better for Unraid. what you say sounds right - although I'm not sure about using an external HDD as a parity drive - never done that (I went to Unraid to use up a ton of old HDD's and an old case) regarding installing a drie into unraid - be warned that any drive put into an unraid array will be formatted entirely, no data will be recoverable.

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Bambu Utila
3 minutes ago, aspdend said:

Try to use USB 2 rather than USB 3 drives as they work better for Unraid. what you say sounds right - although I'm not sure about using an external HDD as a parity drive - never done that (I went to Unraid to use up a ton of old HDD's and an old case) regarding installing a drie into unraid - be warned that any drive put into an unraid array will be formatted entirely, no data will be recoverable.

I only have the USB3 drives available. For now i would even like to skip using the SSD's at all, just the external HD's.

Could i just boot back into Windows when i unplug the USB stick with Unraid on it? That is if i don't format those while i'm in Unraid ofcourse.

For now while testing it out i would like to keep my Windows install if at all possible.

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Dibbes
19 minutes ago, Bambu Utila said:

Could i just boot back into Windows when i unplug the USB stick with Unraid on it? That is if i don't format those while i'm in Unraid ofcourse.

Yes, you can... you can choose which disks to include within the array. You can also use an SSD as a RAID Cache drive, though I'm not sure if USB harddrives can be made part of that. I have never tested that, but to me it would not make any logical sense to allow a USB disk as part of a RAID config...

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BAlGaInTl

I ran OMV for years and liked it.  You can get everything working, but it may involve some tinkering to get drive pooling going.  Or at least it did last time I used it.

 

I switched to Unraid a while back and have been enjoying it a lot.  It makes the process of setting up drive pools much easier.  That being said, there is a cost associated with it.  

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